This review discusses several pervasive myths about peripheral vision, as well as what is actually true: Peripheral vision underlies a broad range of visual tasks, in spite of its significant loss of information. New understanding of peripheral vision, including likely mechanisms, has deep implications for our understanding of vision. From peripheral recognition to visual search, from change blindness to getting the gist of a scene, a lossy but relatively fixed peripheral encoding may determine the difficulty of many tasks. This finding suggests that the visual system may be more stable, and less dynamically changing as a function of attention, than previously assumed.